Game Statistics

[TIGR]

What's the best way to compare the number of people playing different games?

In this case I'm particularly interested in comparing the number of people who play multiplayer CoD 4, MW2, Black Ops, and MW3.

From Steam we have the game stats page which shows only the current day's current and peak players:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

From XFire we have game rankings, and for each game, a graph of the hours played per day, each day of the past month along with the users per day:
http://www.xfire.com/games/

These two sets of stats aren't directly comparable and I expect each has bias (XFire toward CoD4 players, Steam toward the rest). There are other possible sources I'm not taking the time to list here, each with its problems. Is there some obvious was of getting directly comparable numbers of players for each game that I don't know about?

 

[Tudz]

For the COD series since MW2, the Steam stats list, because they're all Steamworks games, anyone playing them will likely have Steam open and monitoring their usage.

I don't imagine Xfire would be too meaningful, as doesn't it only monitor people using the service? Certain games may attract gamers that are more inclined to use Xfire and so that game would have inflated numbers. I don't know how they calculate their numbers either. It says "average hours each day" does that mean they took the total hours and divided by how long the game has been out? Look at Warhammer Online, I personally find it hard to believe its anywhere near Team Fortress 2 for the number of people currently playing it, yet its listed as 13833 hours played today while TF2 is 14204. I don't know if that's skewed because the actual number of hours your average person puts in, the fact more WAR players are running Xfire or because its skewed from the early days back when WAR was (semi) popular.

So yeah, for Steamworks games comparing how many people are currently playing, I'd trust the steamstats before anything else. Comparing non-Steamworks games... I dunno

 

[limitedaccess]

Warhammer Online is a MMO, and I believe still sub based, whereas TF2 is a f2p fps game. Even if the subscriber base for Warhammer Online is lower, those players are more likely to be playing as well as playing more hours on average than TF2.

In terms of the original question, you can get the peak and current player numbers for MW2, Black Ops , and MW3 from Steam. But you cannot get an accurate number for MW1. Also the number is only limited to peak players and current players. It won't tell you things like how many people actually played or how long they spent playing.

Xfire of course is dependent on those using the program. Also I believe it will count non "official" copies, whereas Steam won't (well it does, but in a different way).

If you want sales numbers, those are often reported and can be found via something like Google.

 

[TIGR]

Thanks. If there's a reliable source of the numbers I want, at least I'm not the only one who has trouble finding it.

@limitedaccess, sales numbers aren't what I'm after, though I'm interested in directly comparable stats that for too. Unfortunately, while Google does provide insights, precise and reliable stats are still elusive.

 

[Tudz]

Warhammer Online is a MMO, and I believe still sub based, whereas TF2 is a f2p fps game. Even if the subscriber base for Warhammer Online is lower, those players are more likely to be playing as well as playing more hours on average than TF2.

I still find it pretty hard to believe to be honest. I played Warhammer Online back in the day and the community was never huge, and these days its down to only a handful of servers. I'm surprised to even see it listed above LOTRO on that list, which is a free2play MMO with a much stronger community. Looking at the server stats from 2010 for WAR (it seems people stopped bothering to record since then) its weekly player stats are still less than the CURRENT LOTRO player stats.

I think its skewed by the player base that uses it as well. Certain games you get larger portions of the community using Xfire. Personally I started using Xfire in a game because that's what the people in a specific game were using. I then stopped using it because the games I played subsequently, no one was using it